There has been debate about animals' contribution to ocean circulation, called biomixing, or biogenic mixing. The energy input of schooling fish is significant but the eddies may be too small; so energy is dissipated as heat before impacting oceanic structure. I suggest that high turbulence caused by some very large aggregations of small animals has an important impact via a more direct ecosyst...

Oceanographic data were obtained from ship cruises conducted from 1965 until 2003 in the neritic and oceanic Lebanese waters (Levantine Basin). They include, in addition to Plankton community diversity and abundance, main hydrographic data such as temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, water transparency, chlorophyll a, nitrates and phosphates. The purpose of this work was to elaborate a data...

We analyzed picoeukaryote assemblages in the German Bight at the Helgoland time series site by sequencing cloned eukaryotic 18S rRNA genes in six genetic libraries plus one library from the Orkney Islands from a cruise of opportunity. The libraries were constructed from environmental samples collected at different periods of the year. The same samples were also analyzed using a fingerprinting t...

In closed aquatic environments like ponds or lakes, water bloom caused by eutrophication has severely damaged aquatic ecosystems. Some previous studies suggested that submerged macrophytes contribute to the development of aquatic ecosystems and water purification. Although water purification and lake ecosystem restoration using submerged macrophytes have been greatly studied, their specific mec...

Ecological succession provides a widely accepted description of seasonal changes in phytoplankton and mesozooplankton assemblages in the natural environment, but concurrent changes in smaller (i.e. microbes) and larger (i.e. macroplankton) organisms are not included in the model because plankton ranging from bacteria to jellies are seldom sampled and analyzed simultaneously. Here we studied, fo...

Seasonal patterns of [C]phytoplankton photosynthesis (PP) were examined in six warm monomictic lakes of coastal British Columbia. Four of our study lakes followed typical lake patterns with maximum PP occurring in the spring and minimal rates occurring during the winter. However, the spring maximum occurred several weeks earlier than lakes in other climatic regions. In addition, maximum rates o...

Historical methods of zooplankton sampling and identification are limited, particularly with regard to spatial and temporal resolution in biologically patchy coastal marine ecosystems. One approach to improving zooplankton community characterization is high-resolution plankton imaging coupled with automated plankton identification. The first requirement for this approach is to image a represent...

Global change may be a severe threat to natural and agricultural systems, partly through its effects in altering soil biota and processes, due to changes in water balance. We studied the potential influence of changing soil water balance on soil biota by comparing existing sites along a natural water balance gradient in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. In this study, the community structure of bact...

North Atlantic climate variability does not only have an influence on North Atlantic ecosystems as described in the previous chapters and by Drinkwater et al. (2003), but influences terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere (Ottersen et al. 2001; Mysterud et al. 2003; Stenseth et al. 2002; Straile et al. 2003b). Its impact on freshwater ecosystems has been documented ...

Understanding the origin and evolution of the eukaryotic cell and the full diversity of eukaryotes is relevant to many biological disciplines. However, our current understanding of eukaryotic genomes is extremely biased, leading to a skewed view of eukaryotic biology. We argue that a phylogeny-driven initiative to cover the full eukaryotic diversity is needed to overcome this bias. We encourage...